Topic: Adventure games as technical showcases

I read in a magazine a while back that (point & click style) adventure games often lead in pushing technical boundaries given the popularity of the genre back in the day but was interested in reading more specific examples.

One example that comes to mind for me is Blade Runner - with its animated backgrounds, the way character models were implemented (albeit with some drawbacks) and because it is was one of the earliest DVD games.

There's also titles like Myst obviously with its use of CDs but I'm curious what other examples there are of adventure games being at the forefront of graphics technology and what techniques they were innovating with.

I'm sure there are probably other games that looked as good, but The Curse of Monkey Island looked fantastic for its time. It was like playing a cartoon.

@Bentleyma True. Given the rush of popular animated movies in the early 90s, like Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, etc., I was quite amazed that games like the Monkey Island titles could look even close to that. Adventure games, especially back then, were slow-paced and featured fixed perspectives, so they lended themselves to more detail than say shooters or racers.

Of course, back then, even 320x200 rendered FMVs blew us away and left us wondering if real-time gameplay would ever reach that point — not only did that happen but those rendered FMVs look positively crude by today's standards!

There's a new episode of Broken Sword imminent, it actually looks pretty neat.

Loved Blade Runner back in the day, along with Beneath a Steal Sky.

Point and click adventure games were at the forefront of graphical development in the late 80's and early 90's because they were slow paced and you meant to spend time in a screen. That allowed the artists to truly make great art, and some adventure games were pioneers in scanning painted art into the games. Also some were examples of digitizing actors into the game, not like realistic graphics, but movement of the body etc. When the CD era came around, adventure games were adding speech as one of the firsts in the industry.

Case in point: Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (1992)

You mentioned Myst already but Myst III: Exile felt amazing to me at the time, not just the still renders but also the live (multi-angle!) video.

@StooMonster Yeah the new Broken Sword looks great - particularly the Pyrenees scenes in the trailer. In some interviews, Charles Cecil called the style 'Super 2D' which I think strikes a good balance with the backgrounds between new and old techniques (the character models are still marked as a work in progress in the trailer). There's also a Reforged version of Broken Sword 2 coming which will be interesting to see how they update it - Cecil mentioned in an interview that they're reworking some effects like the fire in the opening scene for example.

@Utimuti You might have watched it already but John gave a good quick overview of Myst 3's technology in the latest DF Retro Supershow alongside mentioning The Last Express's rotoscope technique - so it was nice to see adventure game tech getting some coverage on this week's episode.

Terrible really, spending time replaying old games where there are so many new ones — but I loved these back in the day. Oh my goodness got stuck a couple of times on PS1.

Probably recommend a reforged version of these titles to my kids.